It is difficult to say exactly when it happened. It could have been when donut makers like Tastee and Meche’s got into the game, putting the deep fryer in play. It could have been just earlier this week, when the Bourbon House introduced the Mardi Gras version of its famous frozen brandy milk punch, which comes garnished with a plastic baby and a sprinkling of Carnival-colored sugar.

RUSTY COSTANZA / THE TIMES-PICAYUNEA galette des Rois - you may know it as a king cake - from Croissant d'Or, the New Orleans pÃ¢tisserie.

But my best guess is that the king cake officially supplanted the turducken as exemplar of everything that is both right and wrong with south Louisiana’s status as the Heartland of American Culinary Absurdity on Jan. 6.

That is when Larry Ragusa first appeared in an Internet video, puffing on cigarettes, cursing his brother Vincent and loudly proclaiming to know what the people in New Orleans want in a king cake:

“Garish, lurid, exaggerated and over-the-top flavors and fillings,” he announced. “That’s why every Larry Ragusa King Cake comes with a thin layer of salami and olive salad that lets you know from the very first bite that that’s a Larry Ragusa King Cake you got your hands on.”

Ragusa is not real. And unlike Meche’s and Tastee’s donut king cakes and the Bourbon House’s king cake cocktail, neither are his king cakes. They are the creation of local actor Larry Beron and filmmaker David White, who have collaborated on a series of faux commercial videos, each featuring a king cake that dares to be even more vulgar than the one from the episode before. (The salami and olive salad cake is a breath mint compared to the “Combination A-1,” which adds lemon pudding and “a thin layer of shrimp bordelaise” to the signature fillings.)

As satire, the Ragusa series cuts deeper than much of the meathead humor it resembles. Every new layer he adds to his inedible creations gives caricatured voice to the underlying question behind so many of the meals New Orleanians sit down to every day: How much is too much?

“We just seem to have a penchant for over embellishing everything, particularly with food,” Beron said. “When I was a kid, a king cake was basically a coffee cake sprinkled with sugar. Now it’s to the point where you can’t hardly get that.”

Crawfish-shaped king cake from Hi Do Bakery in Gretna.

The king cakes of Beron’s youth have not disappeared. Classic New Orleans king cakes that deliver the simple-pleasure flavor of sweetened brioche can be found just about anywhere king cakes are sold. They came around this year like they always do, starting on Twelfth Night and continuing through Fat Tuesday, and they will disappear again just as our season of penance begins and the surfaces of so many offices’ file cabinets have become as caked with icing as the cakes themselves.

I’ve enjoyed countless king cakes in just the last few weeks, from flag-waving king cake institutions like Haydel’s Bakery to big box groceries like Rouse’s to French-style pâtisseries La Boulangerie and Croissant d’Or.

What Beron bemoans and Ragusa lampoons is the fact that what are now often referred to as “plain” king cakes — a joke in itself when you consider how colorful and caloric the object being described — have been subjected to a particularly flamboyant strain of New Orleans-style adornment. Today, the humble king cake Beron remembers is but a line on a much larger menu of cakes whose enhancements too often erase what was desirable about the original article.

You know these cakes. They’re stuffed with “creamy” fillings (praline, chocolate Bavarian swirl, cream cheeses resembling Fruit Loops) that proudly don’t resemble any naturally occurring colors or flavors. You may like them, or at least some of them. (I do.) But to a purist, the gaudy barrage brings to mind other uniquely local culinary frustrations: Finding a piece of fish that isn’t topped with more fish, say, or a “salad” that contains at least as much produce as pork.

As Beron put it, “Everybody has an example of something they see at a restaurant and go, ‘Wait, that’s two different things!’ ”

The galette des Rois sold at La Boulangerie and Croissant d’Or apparently repel anything approaching Ragusa-level mischief. They are faithful versions of the king cakes found this time of year in France, something I discovered on an extended trip that took me through Alsace, the Savoie and Paris this past holiday season.

As Christmas gave way to New Year’s, display windows in the pâtisseries crowded with the beautiful, golden-skinned round cakes. They are essentially exercises in puff-pastry perfection, most of them with a cushion of almond paste resting between the flaky outer crusts.

Maurice Delechelle ate galette des Rois and pithivier, a similar style of puff pastry pie, growing up in Tours, France. The young, French-trained pastry chef who opened La Marquise bakery just off Jackson Square in 1972 had no other conception of what a king cake could be. His customers brought him up to speed.

“They said, ‘It’s not the king cake! It doesn’t have the hole in it!’ ” Delechelle recalled. “At that time, you come new to a country, you want to do the thing you’ve learned. I kept doing my way for a while, but I had to accept that I had to do the local style, too.”

More on King Cake

La Marquise is closed (the restaurant Sylvain occupies its former space), and Delechelle is retired. But the chef’s recipes are still being used at Croissant d’Or, the bakery he opened in the early 1980s and sold in 2003. (He still lives in an apartment above it.)

Stephanie Dao, who took the bakery over just last month, reports that Delechelle left an imprint.

“We sell more of the galette than the New Orleans-style king cake,” said Dao, who still uses Delechelle’s recipes. “We even cut them into little slices so people don’t have to buy a whole cake.”

In the 25 years Dao ran Chez Pierre, the Kenner bakery she sold just before Hurricane Katrina, she said she could hardly give away the puff pastry galettes while the traditional New Orleans-style rings flew out the door. Her mirror-image experiences as a king cake merchant have naturally caused her to draw conclusions about the divergent tastes of urban and suburban New Orleanians. The Ragusa character winks at a class divide as well. If you were going to imagine him living someplace, it wouldn’t be on Nashville Avenue.

I used to believe the contradictory king cake styles spoke more to the supposed sophistication gap between Americans and the French. At least that was until last month, when I had dinner in the Paris apartment of the noted food historians Phil and Mary Hyman, who served us a king cake that would have pleased the Doubting Thomas customers Delechelle faced in the earliest days of La Marquise.

Delechelle on the balcony above La Marquise in the 1980s.

It was made by Arnaud Larher, who runs a patisserie of the same name near the Sacré Coeur. Unlike a lot of New Orleans king cakes, it was true brioche, so the crumb had a full, eggy flavor. But it was decorated with sugar and came with a paper crown, which Phil, a Mobile-native of professorial bearing, gamely donned after cutting into the piece with the “feve,” the porcelain figurine that essentially gave birth to the plastic babies New Orleanians warn their children not to choke on this time of year.

It was a galette des Rois, the Hymans explained, only of the type native to southern France. It is sometimes referred to as galette bordelaise. I cringe at the thought of what Larry Ragusa would have done to that refined bit of pastry work, but I’m at peace with the thought of a more sober mind deciding it would be improved by a neon-colored filling or, perhaps, formed into the shape of a fleur de lis.

It’s Mardi Gras season in New Orleans. When the goal is having the time of your life, good isn’t always enough. The moment calls for something memorable.